THE MISS UNIVERSE pageant was not the subject of a boycott when it was held in apartheid South Africa. In fact, the oft referred to event never occurred, and was never scheduled. Our country does not appear as a location on the list of Miss Universe pageants held every year since 1952 — except for a sole 1996 event which was mooted for Johannesburg but then shifted to the USA.
Although some contestants refused to participate in various international pageants if the then Miss South Africa attended, none were barred by their respective governments. They thus exercised their freedom of choice.
The organisers behind the campaign to remove Miss South Africa from the competition being held in Israel this year would like us to believe that similar government actions were taken against the self-same beauty pageant held in apartheid South Africa. It is only the 1996 Miss Universe event which was scheduled to be held in the country, two years after the first democratic elections, but which was later moved.
The blatant denial of the rights of Lalela Mswane, a black woman to decide her fate for herself, especially when it comes to political issues, is both patronising and racist. In a televised interview Palestine4Africa’s Bram Hanekom, upbraids Mswane’s decision to attend, insisting that he, as a white male, should decide her future. In a missive published by IOL, he tells Mswane: “Do as you are told”.
Hanekom claims that since boycotts were used to good measure as one of the many tools of the anti-apartheid movement, similar strategies will be equally effective in ‘gaining rights for Palestinians’. He appears oblivious to the fact that if such an event had been held in the country during the height of apartheid, no black contestants would have been allowed to attend.
The first official Miss South Africa pageant held in 1956 was only open to “white” (Caucasian) females and was organized to send a representative to London for the Miss World pageant”. That year Norma Vorster was crowned Miss South Africa. Two years later, Penny Coelen, was crowned and would later go on to win Miss World. It was not until 1977 that all persons of all races were allowed to compete in the Miss SA competition. “Prior to that, people of colour competed in the Miss Africa South pageant, which was renamed Miss Black South Africa in 1977.”
It is unclear what the goals of the BDS affiliated campaign are — whether or not they are campaigning to effectively end women’s rights in Israel, or merely seek to maintain the status quo viz viLGTBIQ rights in the region, a situation in which Gay rights are restricted in most Arab States and in some cases subject to the death penalty. Apartheid was a policy separating persons according to pseudo-scientific race classification, not national or religious affiliation, and homosexuality was outlawed.
According to Amnesty International (AI), women in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority continue to face discrimination and violence, including killings as a result of gender-based violence. An Hamas-run Islamic court in the Gaza Strip ruled in February that women require the permission of a male guardian to travel. Meanwhile President Mahmoud Abbas amended an election law in March, raising a quota for women in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority legislature to 26%, not the promised 30%, and still a long way away from the 50% female quotient of the population.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgender (LGBT) persons in the “State of Palestine” face legal challenges and discrimination not experienced by non-LGBT residents. An AI 2020 report on Palestine states: “Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza criminalizes [male] consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.” In 2019, the Palestinian Authority (i.e., West Bank) police banned the activities of queer and feminist rights organization Al Qaws and demanded that residents report ‘suspicious’ activities.
Injustice cannot be overcome by Injustice. Forward to a Freedom Charter for the Middle East. Forward to human rights for all. #StandBySecularism
The DA is becoming the poster child of the Right, (Mail & Guardian 18 October 2021) refers
Steven Friedman claims to be a ‘political scientist’. Though his career and professorship may appear to chart a course within South Africa’s academic establishment, he merely demonstrates the parochialism which reigns at these institutions.
A case in point is the manner in which Friedman has taken it upon himself to be the ‘pre-eminent analyst within the country of the British Labour Party (BLP)’
That Friedman cannot distinguish between the polices of either the Tories nor Labour for that matter, and thus conflate both parties with the Democratic Alliance (DA), is par for the course. More alarming, is his general thesis on ”current campaigns against ‘antisemitism’ in Western Europe and the United States” — campaigns which he alleges are not aimed at racial and religious bigotry, but are rather ‘quite the opposite of their stated intentions’.
In his latest piece he states: “Power holders who not so long ago were keeping Jews out of clubs and limiting their number at universities claim to be so angered at anti-Jewish prejudice that they have passed laws to prevent it. But this is not a newfound non-racialism. The campaign is really about protecting the Israeli state, which has become a favourite among the bigoted – including some who really are antisemites – because it discriminates against Palestinians. Conveniently, branding supporters of Palestinian rights as racists can also be used to hound left-wingers out of the British Labour Party. To oppose racist treatment of Palestinians is to be branded a racist.”
When the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour party was released, it was damning, writes Jay Elwes in The Article. “Facing allegations of anti-Jewish racism, the report said Corbyn’s Labour was “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” in an attempt to counter and dismiss those claims.”
The report found there were ‘three especially egregious breaches of the Equalities Act’, including: Political interference in anti-Semitism complaints; a failure to provide adequate training to those handling anti-Semitism complaints; and harassment.
This is a far cry from Friedman’s fanciful version of events.
According the Friedman, not only was there no evidence of anti-Semitism inside the British Labour Party, but ‘the closest (the report) comes to finding that anti-Jewish racism is a problem in Labour is the claim that some in the party use “antisemitic tropes” and say that “complaints of antisemitism [are] fake or smears”.
Corbyn was thus an innocent ‘victim of a trick’, he claims, one which ‘has been used for years in the United States and here to portray racial redress as racist. Less well known is that it is now used to paint opponents of racism as antisemites, people who despise Jews.”
That Friedman was ignoring serious complaints made on the left regarding harassment of members of the Jewish Labour Movement (an anti-racist group) which had resulted in 7 MPs including Chuka Umunna, a black MP leaving the party last year is clear.
He thus continues to trot out a well-known criticism of the right, (‘mere tropes’) in an attempt to smear ‘black Labour’, as hopelessly tied to Israel, while promoting Corbyn’s reinstatement as leader of the party.
The only trick here is Friedman’s own chicanery and mendacity in attributing race to Jews and thus reducing all adherents to Judaism, to the status of simulacra. People who ‘look like they could be Jews’.
It is a common tactic of race-obsessed critics to focus attention on ‘Jews of European origin’, whilst forgetting there is a mosaic of difference within the Jewish diaspora, which includes inter alia Jews of Ethiopian, Nigerian and South African origin. Nations are not races, and rather the issue here is one of ethnicity.
In 2018 I wrote an open letter to Friedman questioning his apparent expertise on the subject of Jewish identity, his neglect of issues relating to secularism, and the problem of ‘who gets to decide who is Jewish or not?’ He failed to respond and continues to issue forth with blatantly false allegations, allegations which have not been tested in any court.
As Thomas Jefferson once stated: ‘I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.’
South Africa is a secular state with a “We, the People’ constitution. The phrase “In humble submission to almighty, God” was removed from earlier drafts of the constitution, and is a well-established narrative recorded by Judge Albie Sachs.
Seth Rogen: ‘I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel’ refers
As an anti-war activist opposed to the abuse of the term ‘apartheid’ in the Middle East, I wish to respond to the latest binary correspondence on Israel and Palestine carried by The Guardian. In particular I wish to point out the tendency by either parties to the conflict to view the other in Manichean terms.
The resulting dualistic cosmology describing ‘a struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness’, has plagued the religious conflict over the final status of Jerusalem, for decades and is not helpful in arriving at a secular solution.
Like the actor Rogen, I too once believed that everything I had been told by my Jewish father was wrong. During the 80s I found the Rabbinical references to the biblical stories told of King David and the construction of the Temple inconsistent with the 1982 invasion of South Lebanon by the IDF under the government of Menachem Begin.
During my years as a student activist and member of the South African Union of Jewish Students, I drew parallels between the SADF invasion of Angola, and became an outspoken critic of Israel military aid to apartheid South Africa.
I was fed Fatah propaganda related to the Nakba and ended up believing that colonialist adventurism by European settlers was the cause of the problem, while Palestinians were the innocent victims. I even took the measure of publically renouncing my right to return as an Orthodox Jew after the construction of the separation barrier in 2000.
Several beatings by Jordanian-Palestinian immigrants and self-styled Palestinian activists set the stage for an end to my delusion. Nevertheless I still persisted in my Anti-Zionist views, attended various rallies, met with a group of Palestinian doctors and even appeared at a UCT seminar hosted by members of Fatah. There I was told the problems were the ‘Jews, Jews, Jews.’
The narrative provided by the PLO began to unravel shortly after I became the subject of a religious inquisition by a corrupt ANC official in 2009/2010, some of the details of which are available in my self-published Amazon book, ‘Life in a Time of Heretics’.
The final parting of company with the Palestinian version of reality coincided with my rediscovery of the missing narrative of Mizrahi Jews, the stories of dispossession and disenfranchisement suffered by oriental and North African Jews.
In particular my late father’s inability to talk about the Farhud Massacre, ‘the violent dispossession” carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1–2, 1941, and followed by the expulsion and dispossession of property of Arab Jews following the events of 1948, put paid to the notion that this was a singular conflict between good and bad. Between 1920 and 1970, some 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries.
Rogen’s revelations reported by Oliver Holmes in the Guardian, that “more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes or fled fighting in the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation” is thus a one-sided tally given the magnitude of these expulsions and the enormity of the Holocaust.
The inescapable facts surrounding the complicity of Amin el Husseini, then Mufti of Jerusalem, and the resulting controversy also need to be weighed, as too the facts surrounding ‘Dhimmitude’, a permanent state of subjugation by either of the parties.
A 2015 Time magazine article addressing the question of whether or not Husseini was the source of the Final Solution certainly demonstrates the problem of focusing exclusively on the Nakba whilst denying the Holocaust. Not that one should make the cardinal error of assuming that all non-Jewish Palestinians are to blame, or thereby privilege one life more than the other.
To put this matter to rest, although Husseini canvassed Hitler before the infamous Wansee Conference where Hitler’s Final Solution was formerly adopted, the decision to ‘exterminate all the Jews, and not simply the Zionist ones’ had already been taken, and thus, the ‘invitations had already been sent out’ when the Mufti arrived to argue his case against Jewish immigration to the Holy Land.
The real nail in the coffin of apartheid analogy however, is when one realises that Husseini’s position in history is much the same as the father of apartheid, DF Malan who introduced the racist Aliens Act in January 1937, restricting Jewish immigration to South Africa before the war. Both men are responsible for condemning hundreds of thousands of admittedly, European Jews, to euthanasia camps in Poland.
Two wrongs do not make a right. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Banning points of view, with which one disagrees, and as Rogen and Holmes motivate by implication, is never a solution. Rather it is my considered opinion that the conflict in the Middle East represents a tragic case of injustice vs injustice, or as the writer Amos Oz has put it, a sad case of competing juridical systems.
THE WRITINGS of Ronnie Kasrils, SACP central committee member 1986-2007, propagandist and former Minister of Intelligence under Mbeki, require the same stringency of analysis as that of Israel Finkelstein, a critic of the Bible. Finkelstein has long been accused of being a biblical minimalist, “someone who believes that only a bare minimum of the Bible is historically trustworthy”, and maintains the book was ‘essentially the work of`a creative copywriter‘ to advance an ideological agenda.
For starters, Kasrils recent opinion piece published by the Daily Maverick may be seen as an amateurish attempt to rehash the work of Shlomo Sand, who seeks to replace Zionism with Canaanism. In other words, the belief that the land of Canaan, referred to in the Bible existed, and further, was the central narrative, before the Romans arrived on the scene, only to quash the Bar Kokhba revolt, a revolt not of Hebrews but rather Canaanites.
Sand has been taken to task for presenting “dubious theories” regarding Jewish identity as historical facts. His controversial claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who purportedly converted in the early Middle Ages, has been debunked by Shaul Stampfer in the Journal of Jewish Social Studies.
Stampfer found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”
Daniel Lazare writing on Sand, in the ‘London Review of Books’ disagrees and says: “The Invention of the Jewish People eagerly trumpets the discovery of the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, the foremost proponent of the new archaeology, that the conquest of Canaan never occurred and that the dual monarchy of David and Solomon, supposedly the wonder of the ancient world, was a myth. “
“But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE.”
Lazare goes on to say: “Sand seems unaware of the conflict between the two views or of the fact that Finkelstein and the journalist Neil Asher Silberman issued a stinging rebuttal of the minimalist stance in 2006”
It may also be been shown that Sand’s ideas are borrowed from other sources, for example, a work published 5 years earlier by Hassan Bash, which claims to have ‘scientifically proven that the Jews of today do not descend from ancient Israel stock’ in the process repeating many racialised ideas about the Jewish people, also evident in Nazi literature.
In the same way Arthur Koestler deserves credit for his 1976 book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe‘, a hypothetical work, whose stated intent was ‘to make antisemitism disappear by disproving its racial basis.’
Despite the controversy, and the rush to displace history, Kasrils like many of today’s armchair historians, fail to note the state of Syria-Palaestina was created by the Roman Empire in its effort to quash the Bar Kokhba Revolt following “a rebellion of the Jews of the Roman province of Judea” in 135 AD. The last of three major Jewish–Roman wars, recorded by Roman historians.
Whether you believe as Finkelstein does, that the neighbouring state of Israel was larger and more significant than Judea or not, does not make this well-recorded fact of history disappear.
In order to promote the kind of replacement theory and displacement praxis that is evident on our nation’s campuses, Kasrils goes even further than Finkelstein, in his minimalist assertions and then by entertaining all and sundry with the notion that the modern State of Israel emerged as a ‘colonial project fomented by Zionists, Agnostics and Atheists.’
As a communist, Kasrils should know better than to attack Jews for being communists, in the process denying Agnostics the right to live in a secular state.
As a person affected by a racist, anti-Enlightenment decision handed down by a corrupt ANC official, a morally reprehensible tract which seeks to define and restrict Jewish identity, I must object. (This at the same time that it replaces my own case with the case of the other party, his own client — all whilst upholding apartheid justifications for separate development.) I find both replacement theology and displacement praxis and its descendent in contemporary replacement ethnography as galling as either claim by either party to the conflict.
The Kasrils text however, is one of many dubious replacement theories circulating on social media, one immediately open to refutation, not since the Bible is a Fairy Tale, whose status is similar to any book by the Brothers Grimm, but rather since modern history is replete with examples of internecine violence and failure to abide by equality in treatment under law.
In this respect Israel and Palestine are not alone, and one has merely to examine the case of Cyprus — or India and Pakistan.
A recent Time magazine article addressing the question of whether or not then Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Husseini was the source of the Final Solution is but one example of the general problem of focusing exclusively on the Nakba whilst denying the Holocaust.
To put this matter to rest, although Husseini rallied behind the infamous Wansee Conference where Hitler’s Final Solution was formerly adopted, the decision to ‘exterminate all the Jews, and not simply the Zionist ones’ had already been taken, and thus, the ‘invitations had already been sent out’ when the Mufti arrived to argue his case against Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. (1)
For the record, Husseini’s position in history is much the same as the father of apartheid, DF Malan who introduced the racist Aliens Act in January 1937, restricting Jewish immigration to South Africa before the war.
Both men are responsible for condemning hundreds of thousands of Jews to euthanasia camps in Poland.
Two wrongs do not make a right. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Banning points of view, with which one disagrees, and as Kasrils would have it, is never a solution. Rather it is my considered opinion that the conflict in the Middle East represents a tragic case of injustice vs injustice, or as the writer Amos Oz has put it, a case of competing juridical systems.
THE argument that Israel represents the ‘Jews of South Africa’, often made by members of the SAJBD is as fallacious as the equal assertion that BDS and its leadership represent the diversity of Jewish history and culture, in particular the legacy of Jewish activists during the freedom struggle.
Butler maintains, that “BDS draws on longstanding traditions, some of which were importantly developed in the context of the struggle against apartheid”. While the two struggles may appear similar in mode at the surface, there are significant and important divergences, differences which we disregard at our peril.
For starters, the South African struggle was an epic battle against colonialism and white domination in support of democracy and secularism. Activists such as myself were pitted against a white regime which was theocratic, undemocratic and avowedly Christian in outlook.
Butler goes on to write: “Let us not forget the large numbers of Jews who have fought in social justice struggles, including the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (Joe Slovo, Arthur Goldreich, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman), who contest the radical inequalities that form the basis of Israel’s claim of Jewish sovereignty and its claim to maintain Jewish demographic advantage at all costs.”
The claims made with regard to Goldreich and Helen Suzman are instructive and bear greater consideration. A piece published by Benjamin Pogrund for the Helen Suzman Foundation states: “Use of the apartheid label and repeated references to “genocide” against Palestinians and denunciations of Zionism as “racism” are at best ignorant and naïve and at worst cynical and manipulative.”
Unlike the South African struggle where Jews enjoyed leadership roles, and where persons such as Joe Slovo were in many respects over-represented than other minority groups, both Fatah and Hamas have failed miserably to include Jews in top positions.
Palestinian claims about the alleged “Jewish race” share more in common with the racist objectives and malicious aims of the puritans of the Nationalist Party than the alleged non-racialism of the ANC. To reiterate, nations are not races.
Unlike the Palestinian struggle which lacks any meaningful document such as the Freedom Charter setting out winnable aims and objectives, civil rights for all, the South African situation is rather different, and thus the recipe for achieving a negotiated outcome and peace settlement in our own country was founded upon a winning constitutional formula.
BDS have failed time and again to canvas the opinion of persons either referred to as ‘Jews’ or self-defined as Jewish, in a skewed solidarity politics that ignores the problem of Jewish identity. Butler is only able to espouse her own views because other views and Jewish voices have been silenced by the BDS politburo.
Though Butler’s misguided rhetoric on anti-semitism is to be welcomed, let’s be forthright and stop beating around the bush, anti-semitism is open hostility towards secular Jewish identity.
Attempting to provide a non-violent and anti-racist veneer to a religious struggle in which both sides are informed by religious texts in a battle over the final status of Jerusalem, avoids the open inquiry and evidence-based empirical research that needs to occur if we are understand the many dimensions to the problem.
As a person whose Jewish identity has become the subject of a racist legal inquisition in South Africa at the behest of the perpetrators of apartheid, I therefore do take exception to the banning of opinion and obliteration of independent voices outside of these two diametrically opposed camps, injustice vs injustice.
I can only commend UCT council for not caving into the zealots.
It is not too late, nor out of the bounds of reason, to embrace a secularist and non-partisan ‘third way’, that avoids scapegoating of those who disagree with leaders and pundits on either side, and which avoids sacrificing democratic freedoms, freedom of speech, while protecting constitutional rights in our own country.
NOTE: For the record, DRL a graduate of UCT Center for African Studies, is opposed to the separation barrier, is in favour of a limited arms embargo against the State of Israel, and does not support any cultural or academic boycott targeting persons of Jewish descent on the basis of our alleged history and identity.
RESISTANCE to war has a long and noble history. From pacifists during the Anglo-Boer War, objectors to WW1 and WW2, conscripts against the Vietnam War and South Africa’s own Border War, the names and faces of those who have chosen the difficult path of combating militarism and state-sponsored aggression, number in their thousands.
When dissent is quashed by political expediency the nuances and cadence of individual struggle against war is lost. The evolution of the ‘just-war thesis’ and ‘holy war’ by either side to the conflict in the Middle East provides a case in point, as does resistance to the promotion of war as a solution.
During 1987, ANC stalwart, then SRC president Cameron Dugmore, stood on a podium alongside 23 white conscripts from UCT opposed to military conscription during apartheid. The initial group of conscientious objectors, included Christian pacifists as well as then president of the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS), Jonathan Handler. Significantly Handler opposed the Border War on the basis of a defense of Israel.
The result was that I relinquished my membership of SAUJS. At the time, Israel was involved in a war with Lebanon, which in many respects was reminiscent of our own border war. It is a position which I have since lived to regret, (see secularism below). Instead of joining Handler in his “just war thesis”, which was little more than a promotion of Zionism, and thus a moral justification for his later joining the Israeli Defense Force, and with Dugmore rubber-stamping Handler’s participation, I took the difficult path of involvement in South Africa’s armed struggle, crossing the colour line and embracing the culture of resistance and rebellion.
The creation of the environmental justice movement in the aftermath of the banning of the ECC, and my work for Grassroots, South Press, Sached/New Nation form a body of work and deserve a chapter on their own. However the lesson drawn from this experience is that the Middle East problem is not as easily reducible to a binary struggle between black and white, right and wrong. Providing a rubber stamp to either of the parties to the conflict, in my case, my open support for the Palestinians, has resulted in the dilemma of today.
Faced with a difficult and unenviable predicament, I chose a very different approach, that of civil disobedience. Lodging a public objection to Handler’s participation on the platform and Dugmore’s acquiescence, (and without access to all the facts) would have merely playing into the hands of the Botha government and its securocrats. It also risked an embarrassing side-show, in a vulnerable moment. Nevertheless we exchanged words during the media briefing session. For Michael Rautenbach, this was sign that I was ‘simply not ready for the big time’.
Not only was the SAUJS involvement untenable, but as a 19-year-old enrolled in law-school, the problem did not lead itself to any immediate legal answers, save for hoping that it would all somehow pan out and that history would be the better judge. An outright objection against the “just war thesis” and the use of ‘holy war’ instead of simple resistance, would also have required a Phd essay written with all the gusto necessary to balance the complexity of the struggle itself, solidarity amongst comrades, campus spies, security police paranoia, my call-up papers and the lack of engagement by ECC leadership.
With no support for my nascent position from either SAUJS nor ECC’s Dugmore and the merry bunch of Christian fanatics who were assured of a place in heaven with emotional guidance from the Church, and with Atheists then in the minority within the ECC itself, I took my struggle against the system and my membership card elsewhere. Burning my call-up papers, I declined to participate, and instead sent the state ‘a postcard from exile’. My arrival at an outright rejection of war was much later than anticipated, and only after an encounter with the international peace movement following the democratic elections.
A secular challenge
It is a period which has come to haunt me in recent years, the difficulties following the banning of the ECC and SWAPO solidarity committee, not because I have been cross-examined by a racist bigot acting for a racist company, in an unfair legal proceeding without the aid of an attorney, on my involvement in some of the details — This whilst also being subjected to a religious inquisition of my secular identity. But because the paranoia surrounding BDS in its current form, and its supporters from the far-right in Fatah and Hamas, combined with Zionist intransigence and lack of public debate, have all moved to close down what little dissent and individual freedom remains.
There are many robust claims made by either parties to the conflict in the Middle East. The result though is invariably the same — the silencing of individual right to dissent, the removal of civil liberties, the abolition of the right to freedom from religion, the right to not be constrained by the religious views of others, the very essence of freedom of religion. Theist, Non-Theist, Atheist. For my part, the conflict is one of injustice vs injustice, a terrible ‘battle between monsters and maniacs’, whether blood on the streets of Tel Aviv, Ramallah, or Gaza, and neighbouring Syria, while the public all too readily reach out for religious texts, as easily as weapons of war.
South Africa for all intents and purposes is a secular country. We pride ourselves in our Constitution which ostensibly guarantees religious and cultural rights, and we like to think we are an exception and there is somehow continuity with our secular struggle and the struggle for human rights in the Middle East. This remains to be seen.
To date there has been no proof that we are special, except propaganda and lies. The short-circuiting of debate. The sheer religiosity of those involved. The astonishing willingness to resort to bloodshed. It is time to face up to facts and to stop the rubber-stamping and handing out of blank cheques to activists on either side, preaching the exact opposite of truth. There is another path, another way out of the conflict, besides advocacy of hatred, bloodshed and eternal war.
The very essence of secularism, according to George Holyoake, the man who coined the term, is not the absence of religion, but rather the absence of religious rules. “A Secularist guides himself by maxims of Positivism, seeking to discern what is in Nature—what ought to be in morals—selecting the affirmative in exposition, concerning himself with the real, the right, and the constructive. Positive principles are principles which are provable.”
Secularism is firmly based upon enlightenment values, the right not to be subjected to religious persecution by the state nor any religious authority or otherwise. Secular values are the ‘We, the People’ values enshrined by our Constitution which are remarkable absent when it comes to the Middle East. To date there is no Freedom Charter for Palestinians and Israelis.
If South Africans are to contribute to justice and a peaceful solution, it must be because we are also willing to defend our constitution, our own history of secularism and opposition to war in all its forms, our nation’s own war resisters over the ages, and thus our nation’s core values in the non-aligned movement.
Unlike many politico’s, we must urge seekers of peace, to do this with the courage to avoid rubber-stamping the “just war thesis” and ‘religious war’ come what may, and whatever the consequences. To avoid providing wholesale support for any of the belligerent parties to the conflict over the final status of Jerusalem, whatever the ends and means, and no matter the outcome, and without at very least, measuring the results against our own conscience, free-will and opinion.
[Note: John Stremlau believes South Africa has a vital role to play. It certainly doesn’t if its media is closing down debate and opinion within our own borders]
PIERRE Rehov take us behind the Hamas smokescreen to reveal a chilling reality missing from the mainstream media narrative on the border fence protests. Footage below shows activists cutting a fence to enter an exclusion zone defended by the IDF. The same narrative is contained in a piece by Ivo Vegter, a man whom Medialternatives has often criticised.
Vegter defends Gareth Cliff as quoted by the media.
UN human rights chief says Israel used “wholly disproportionate” force against Palestinian border protests which have left over 100 people dead. Israel’s Ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter rejected the blame, saying ‘Israel had done everything possible to avoid harming civilians.’
Another documentary worth watching to gain insight, also below, depicts the missing story of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and the reason why the borders of 1948 aren’t going to disappear any time soon. The all important context missing from the current factually unsupported media bias.
A piece on international Farhud Day commemorating the dispossession and displacement of 850 000 Arab Jews, held every 1 June, demonstrates this exact same point. A book is also available on the subject.
One can only recommend that viewers keep an open mind, and avoid taking a binary position on a conflict which has resulted in Injustice v Injustice.
Significant departures from the political “truth” associated with the Jerusalem conflict
1. DEBUNKED: East Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine Under International Law, and the Corpus Separatum, the City of Jerusalem was to be an independent enclave. It was Jordan which occupied East Jerusalem 1946-1967, forceably removing Jewish communities which had been there for 1000 years. Subsequently Israel occupied Jerusalem 1967-current. See this twitter thread on Jewish East Jerusalem.
The Jewish quarter was destroyed during the Jordanian occupation, including the Hurva synagogue and the adjacent Nachmanides synagogue, built in 1267 and also the Jewish cemetery whose tombstones were used in later constructions. The Tifereth Israel synagogue was also destroyed. The tomb of Simeon the Righteous dating back to 2nd Century CE is right in the middle of what is now Sheik Jarrah. Batn Al-Hawa حي بطن الهوى the largest part of Silwan Jerusalem was established by Yemeni Jews in 1881. Jordan also destroyed the ancient Beth El Yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem, established in 1737. Beth El was the most influential of the mystical yehivas, led by Yemeni sage Rabbi Shalom Shar’abi zt”l
More importantly Jordan destroyed the ancient Sephardic Porath Yosef Yeshiva adjacent to the Western Wall, deliberately using explosives to remove all Jewish learning from the old City, exiling hundreds of students. This was not an attack on “Zionism”, but rather on the core of Judaism. Jews were not allowed to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem between 1948-1967.
2. DEBUNKED: The Quran bestowed the land upon the Palestinians Replacement theologians often claim “God is not a real-estate agent” and then in the same breath, ‘Al Aqsa is the third most holy site in Islam“, meaning, Jerusalem is somehow an undisputed asset within the broader Ummah, and the surrounding lands are thus exclusively for the Arabs or Muslims. Aside from the fact that the word, Ummah, means ‘community of many faiths’, the actual whereabouts and history of Al Aqsa is disputed, with some scholars claiming the first Al Aqsa is in Saudi Arabia.
Notably, the Quran does not refer to Palestine, but instead has several passages granting Israel to the Jews, and recognising their association. Al Baqara 2.47 ; Al Maida 5.21; AlAaraf 7.137; Yunus 10.93; Al Israa 17.2-104;Ta Ha 20.80; Al Mumim 40.53; AlDukhan 44.32; Al Jathiya 45.16, all refer to Israel and lead credence to the idea that the Quran itself borrowed heavily from the Old Testament.
A Saudi Arabian lawyer Osama Yamani in 2020 claimed that Al-Aqsa (the Farthest) Mosque, traditionally held to be Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina, is not in fact, located on the Al-Aqsa compound (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Writing in Saudi news outlet Okaz, he maintained that the mosque is actually located in Al Ju’ranah, near Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
3. DEBUNKED:There is a map showing how Israel has displaced Palestinians
The popular ‘meme map’ is demonstrably false since it drops context, confuses demographics with territorial sovereignty and is just plain inaccurate. See a good discussion about this by Elan Journo and Nikos Sotirakopoulus.
There is further dropped context: Maps of ‘Palestine’ provided by the Ottoman Railroad Company in the 1920s shows both banks of the Jordan, as do Arabic maps produced prior to WW1. While both the Ottomans and the British carved up territory in the Levant according to arbitrary districts, all related to centralisation of colonial power and rule, the area which is currently disputed is better described as “Western Palestine”, and forms some 25 585 km² to 28,000 km² under the British Mandate.
Under Ottoman rule, the territory claimed for the “Palestinian state” was organized into three states, Jerusalem, Gaza and Nablus, all linked to the Damascus Province. ‘Palestine’, in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, was first linked to the state of Sidon, later to Syria and then to Beirut, which was founded in the last period. In 1220 Jacques de Vitry wrote in his History of Jerusalem: “And there are three Palestines, which are parts of Greater Syria.”
The BDS map ignores the 1920 San Remo Conference which partitioned a former empire, and the later division of British Mandate Palestine and French Mandate Syria, which created TransJordan aka Hashemite Palestine and Syria (arguably, Syrian Palestine) with parcels of land going to Syria, Southern Lebanon and Jordan. It must be remembered that the Ottomans, supported Hitler and the Kaiser, and thus Germany in both world wars. Both Saudi Arabia’s Khalid Al Hud Al Gargani and Palestine’s Amin al-Husseini met and canvassed Hitler to deal with the “Jewish Problem”
Map of Ottoman Administrative Districts
At 22 145 km², Israel occupies less than 18.45% of the area commonly referred to as The Levant, which covers the eastern shore-land of the Mediterranean, a stretch of land approximately 800 km long and approximately 150 km wide, with total mass of 120 000 km².In contrast the Arab World occupies some 13,132,327 km2
The BDS map cynically ignores the 1949 Armistice line and the displacement of Arab Jews from Arab countries and their loss of land, some 100 000 square km of deeded property confiscated by Arab states. The map thus ignores the reality that part of British Mandate occupied by Jordan and Egypt was ethnically cleansed with no Jewish population left. Jewish inhabitants of communities like Gush Etzion, Hebron and Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem were absorbed by the new State of Israel.
People who bandy around the BDS map invariably fail to compare Greece and Turkey and India/Pakistan, two examples where populations have been separated according to religion and ethnicity and involving population swaps. Sudan was recently partitioned between the north Arab half and the south African half. Ireland remains separated between the Protestant north and Catholic south.
A 2020 academic paper on the question Is Replacement Theology Anti-Semitic? begins by defining anti-Semitism as “normally understood as prejudice or hatred against Jewish people as a race” before concluding that since Christianity doesn’t perceive the Jews as a race, Christian theology cannot, by definition be anti-Semitic.
The infamous 1975 UN resolution 3379 ‘equating zionism with racism‘ was overturned by an overwhelming majority of nations in 1991. The same assertion was voted out of the final text of the controversial 2001 Durban Conference on Racism and the text reaffirmed at Durban II. A highly flawed 2017 UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) report examining the policies of Israel within the context of a UN definition of apartheid, admits the error of race, proceeds to supply ”reasons for the error of comparison” and states, there is ‘no single, authoritative, global definition of any race’ at the same time that it attributes race characteristics to Jews for the purposes of analysis.
The same category error appears in an equally flawed 2009 local HSRC report written around the time of Durban II. While the policies of Israel may, for its critics, are alleged to be reprehensible and morally indefensible, the root cause is not race, (a loaded term) but rather the confluence of religion and nationality and in particular, religious schism which results in nationality on the basis of religion, a fact common to many Middle Eastern countries.
Subsequent reports (Amnesty, HRW) for the most part, refer to the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which is targeted at crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” [my underline]
Without any sense of irony, the UN and Criminal Court definition is routinely stripped of its meaning, as the term ‘racial group’ is applied to nationality by various NGOs, and subsequently applied willy nilly, to arrive at imposed race definitions from above.
Fall 2011, Robbie Sabel writes in vol 23, 3/4 of Jewish Political Studies Review: The comparison of Israel to South Africa under white supremacist rule has been utterly rejected by those with intimate understanding of the old Apartheid system. Israel is a multi-racial and multi-colored society, and the Arab minority actively participates in the political process. Incitement to racism in Israelis a criminal offence, as is discrimination on the basis of race or religion. The accusation is made that the very fact that Israel is considered a Jewish state proves an “Apartheid-like” situation. Yet the accusers have not a word of criticism against the tens of liberal democratic states that have Christian crosses incorporated in their flags, nor against the Muslim states with the half crescent symbol of Islam. For Arab states to denote themselves as Arab Republics is not objectionable.
June 27, 2021, Marcus Montague-Mfuni, Harvard ‘Crimson Diversity and Inclusivity Committee Chair’ and Associate editor, (Social Studies and African and African American Studies), writes opinion piece: Don’t Call What Israel is Doing Apartheid ‘ Apartheid, to the people it has directly affected, refers to something quite distinct and I would like to give those events their own sanctified space in our language.”
“We have propped up the morally and legally corrupt notions that Israel is guilty of apartheid, colonialization and genocide. To what benefit? Africa is now the global eye of terrorism and slavery is rampant in no less than 5 African countries, some of which have had a seat on the UNHRC.” Olga Meshoe-Washington in her address to UN, June 13, 2022.
September 2022 Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, issues her report, reiterating the findings of the withdrawn 2018 UN ESCWA report. She claims the definition of apartheid with regards Israel, is “practically and legally correct”.
On January 20, 2023 the European Commission issued a statement that it “considers that it is not appropriate to use the term apartheid in connection with the State of Israel. The Commission uses the non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA definition) as a practical guidance tool and a basis for its work to combat antisemitism. Claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour is amongst the illustrative examples included under the IHRA definition.”
5. DEBUNKED: Arab Israelis do not possess the vote. They are allowed to vote in the Knesset, however Arabs living in the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority do not. Elections for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) were held in Palestinian Autonomous areas from 1994 until their transition into the State of Palestine in 2013. Elections were scheduled to be held in 2009, but was postponed because of the Fatah–Hamas conflict. This is a major and significant human rights issue.
No physical wall was ever built by the apartheid state. Bantustan leaders were puppets of Pretoria at best. None of the bantustans ever waged war against the central government. If the PA is not an apartheid bantustan except in metaphor, what is it? Like South Africa’s North West province, critics may see it as a de facto internal province caught up in armed insurrection against the central government, the Israeli state. A position of statelessness, pacification and occupation.
The same goes for Gaza, arguably, a subsidiary or satellite of both Egypt, Israel and Iran.
How can this be solved? A plurinational, overlapping state solution, and involving neighbours Egypt and Jordan, would do a lot to resolve friction while ensuring independence and the maintenance of human rights. Reasonable accommodation of differences in faith and religious outlook is a prerequisite. Keep an open mind.
6. DEBUNKED: The majority Arab Palestinians were displaced in 1948 by a white minority, and the result is the Nakba or catastrophe. Focusing on the 700 000 displaced persons, removed from the Jewish side of Palestine under UN mandate, adding them to some 250 000 Arabs who had chosen to move to the Arab Palestine half, and forgetting that some 850,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced and dispossessed from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen, & the MENA region, at the same time during a war by the Arab states, results in Nakba inflation. An inflation which also ignores the return of hundreds of thousands of black Ethiopian Jews, and the plight of Yemeni Jews and other historical communities in the region.
“Jerusalem’s sedentary population numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Muslims and 8,000 Jews. The Muslims are, of course, the masters in every respect. Nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem.”Karl Marx, 1854
Forcible transfer of populations was a factor of both the Ottoman and Persian Empires. In 1917 a mass expulsion of the Jews of Jerusalem was ordered by Djemal Pasha, though the outcome was narrowly averted due to the influence of the Prussian government, the eight thousand Jews of Jaffa nevertheless suffered deportation, and their property was seized as the region’s Jewish population was affected by the events of WW1, which included the Armenian Genocide. A report by a United States consul describing the Jaffa deportation was published in the June 3, 1917 edition of The New York Times.
Palestine 1920, an Al-Jazeera documentary unwittingly shows how the creation of a railroad in the 1920s allowed thousands of immigrants from all over the Ottoman Empire to migrate to what was then, a sparsely populated territory.
A 1936 economic review in the Damascus newspaper Al Ayam corroborates this assertion, by complaining about the migration. “Whole villages in the Hauran have been emptied of their people, who are drifting into [Mandate] Palestine. Count De Martel, French High Commissioner for Syria, asserted in the summer of 1934 that even Arab merchants were moving from Damascus to [Mandate] Palestine because of the [Jewish created] prosperity there; and in 1936 the head of the Moslem Youth Association at Beirut, Jamil Bek Bashem wrote that, “There is a penetration into [Mandate] Palestine of an army of Syrian labourers.”
De Haas’s 1934 history of Palestine references as follows: “Today’s Palestinians are immigrants from many nations, Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Algerians, etc etc”.
Robert Kennedy (later assassinated by a Palestinian) was moved to write in the Boston Post, June 3, 1948:“The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500 000 Arabs, in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into [Jewish] Palestine, to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state.”
However, records show this migratory process began well before the breakup of Ottoman Syria by the Colonial Powers into the Mandate Palestine and Transjordan sub-regions. British Consul, James Finn, wrote on June 1860:“I learn of the arrival of thousands of the Beni Sukhr Arabs who are never seen this side of the Jordan”.
Focusing on the Nakba renders the history of the region and earlier pogroms against Jews such as the successive Safed pogroms and Hebron Massacre, invisible.
In 1917 a mass expulsion of the Jews of Jerusalem was ordered by Djemal Pasha, though the outcome was narrowly averted due to the influence of the Prussian government, the eight thousand Jews of Jaffa nevertheless suffered deportation, and their property was seized as the region’s Jewish population was affected by the events of WW1, which included the Armenian Genocide. A report by a United States consul describing the Jaffa deportation was published in the June 3, 1917 edition of The New York Times.
In March 1950, Iraq’s Revocation of Citizenship Bill went into effect. Within two months, the first 10,000 Iraqi Jews fled through Iran to Israel leaving their possessions and assets behind. 120,000 Iraqi Jews found refuge in Israel within a year of their expulsion.
7. DEBUNKED:Israel is the result of the Balfour Declaration, a colonial enterprise at best. The country unilaterally declared its independence during the war of 1948, and the situation under Benjamin Netanyahu may be likened to UDI in Rhodesia. However unlike Rhodesia, it is only certain Arab states which refuse to accept the existence of Israel. The internal friction between black Mizrahi and white Ashkenazi and Separdhi Jews bares no similarity to the conflict between the majority Shona and the white regime of Rhodesia’s Ian Smith. In 1964 Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, much like Eastern Palestine was turned into Jordan by the British in 1946.
Significantly, it was King Abdullah of Jordan who proposed that he become ‘King of Palestine’ at the 1948 Jericho conference, a move opposed by Nazi-collaborator, Amin al-Husseini’s All-Palestine government. Fatah later attempted a coup in Jordan, in an event known as Black September (1970) and were thrown out of Jordan, resulting in the fraudulent “Palestine within Palestine” narrative we see today. A narrative which ignores the reality of territory apportioned under Mandate Palestine and the later UN partition plan.
The early Zionist project was undoubtedly couched within the terms of what was then, considered a respectable colonial endeavour (playing up to the colonial authorities). It sought to deal with the problem of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia, and later the threat presented by the rise of the Nazis. The resulting colonial sheen painted over this picture of stateless Jewish refugees, which was the chief issue at the 1938 Evian Conference, and poses the question of who in reality was the donor nation? At the time no independent Jewish state existed to which Jewish Palestine/ Israel could be considered a colony.
“The British government, in its attitude towards the Jewish population in Palestine, has given ample credence to the suspicion that they are firmly against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.”Robert Kennedy, Dispatches, Boston Globe, June 4, 1948
8. DEBUNKED:You’re waving around the Palestinian Flag … This flag is in reality the Pan-Arab flag, a flag whose colors are common to Jordan,Western Sahara, Syria’s Ba’ath Party (see Syrian Baath Party Insignia) and the Iraqi 1958 flag, and not merely the flag of one country. In fact this flag wasn’t even around prior to the British Mandate. That honor goes to the 1917 flag of the Arab Revolt reportedly designed by British diplomat Mark Sykes, the so-called Flag of Hejaz, which was deployed to unify Arab revolt against the Ottomans during the war, and whose horizontal colors stood for the Abbasid (black), Umayyad (white) and Rashidun (green) caliphates. It was this flag, also adopted by Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, who in 1918 told Woodrow Wilson that it symbolished Hashemite rule over the Arab World, which evolved into the Pan Arab flags we see today.
An inscription to a Flag in the Royal Collection “This flag was presented to King George V by the King of the Hejaz in 1918. The King of the Hejaz launched the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule, in alliance with Britain.”
The first Palestinian flag recognised by the international community wasn’t even green and red, it was blue and white with a Magen David, and thus its was Jewish Palestine (Western Palestine) became independent in 1948.
The images below are Larousse Dictionary, Jewish Palestine, Flag of Jordan, Flag of Western Sahara, Syrian Ba’ath Party
Syrian Ba’ath Party
9. DEBUNKED: Palestinians are fighting for equality
Persons who identify themselves as Palestinians are not fighting to sing Hatikva alongside other citizens in Israel, nor are the seeking to create the only democratic Arab state in the region, or a country where Jews may live in relative safety. The most common refrain is “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free“, by which they seek to replace the current state of Israel with an Arab state, like any other, and which would be known as simply, ‘the nation-state of Palestine’. Israel has offered Palestinians a state along the 1967 border at least twice (Barak-Arafat and Olmert-Abbas) and require Palestinian recognition of a Jewish Israel. While Fatah appears to have accepted some form of two-state arrangement by promoting East Jerusalem as the capital of any future arrangement. Hamas are adamant the entire area currently occupied by Israel should be ceded to Arab control and the Jews at best, subjected to dimmitude in which they pay jizyah, a religious tax, and in the worst case scenario, to be forcibly removed from the region. Unlike in South Africa, there is currently no secular Freedom Charter setting out any rights which may be granted under either dispensation. The current internal charter of Fatah proclaims: “Revolution is our path to freedom, independence, and construction“. While Fida’i, the national anthem proposed by Fatah for their state, and adopted by the PA in 1996, openly speaks of ‘sacrifice, revenge and vendetta’.
10. DEBUNKED:Which came first, chicken or the egg? The first Zionist Congress was held in 1897 some thirty years before the idea of a Palestinian State originated, and it was thus a secondary movement which evolved alongside later ideas to create a separate state besides Transjordan and following the 1948 Jericho conference where King Abdullah’s proposal to become “King of Palestine” was rejected by all-Husseini’s ‘All Palestine’ Government in Gaza.
The Palestinian struggle is thus a lot younger than Zionism, it only got going in the 1960s following the 1931 World Muslim Congress held in Jerusalem where it was first proposed by al-Husseini and even encouraged by the British. Remember, al-Husseini is the man behind the 1929 Hebron Massacre and later 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, arguably the first Intifada, and also the Farhud. He canvassed Hitler to ‘deal with the Zionist Jews’. It is this second movement which seeks to emulate and replace the first, in a strategy which may be termed “Replacement Theology“.
11. DEBUNKED:Hamas and Fatah are the equivalent of the ANC and PAC during the struggle.
“Support for Yasser Arafat and his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state, legally.” Nelson Mandela, Ted Koppel Show 1990.
While all these parties are for the most part, nationalistic, the ANC is the only secular party which has until now, consistently supported civil rights for all persons in the region. The other parties raising the Pan Arab flag waved around at Pro-Palestine rallies, are mostly theocratic nationalist movements, and only resemble other movements insomuch as Arab autonomy in the region is concerned. Fatah is nominally secular insofar as divergence within Islam is concerned and thus tolerates other groups, (see Dhimmitude). Embarrassingly, Hamas was forced in 2017 to amend its charter advocating death for all Jews, to death for only Zionist Jews, to bring its objectives more in line with the Fatah Movement which supports the borders of 1967. More importantly, the ANC had an end-game strategy involving compromises, no such strategy is evident amongst the Palestinians. It was the National Party which opposed LGBTIQ+ rights, and supported the death penalty, not the ANC. No Gay Pride for Gaza, ditto Palestinian feminist group Aswat, based only in Haifa. There is thus a qualitative difference between these two struggles, one backed by the Freedom Charter, the other by religious texts and history books associated with previous Empires. The result is Injustice v Injustice.
12. DEBUNKED: Israel supported the apartheid regime until the bitter end. While Israel was slow to act on sanctions against South Africa, and collaborated with the regime on nuclear weapons, it severed such ties in 1987. “There is no room for discrimination, whether it’s called apartheid or any other name“, then foreign minister Shimon Peres said in the New York Times. “We repeat that we express our denunciation of the system of apartheid. The Jewish outlook is that every man was born in the image of God and created equal.” The country also cited US pressure and threat of withdrawal of Aid. The assertion thus ignores the role played by Western countries such as Thatcher’s Britain in supporting apartheid, or the fact that Zionists stood trial in South Africa for opposing apartheid, it also avoids the actual commonality, pariah status, in many ways similar to the position of Taiwan today. In many respects the Palestinian cause shares common ground, not with the South African struggle but rather with the Anglo Boer War, “one of the great liberal and left-wing causes of the late 19th century.” Ignoring obvious chauvinism, Afrikaners were seen “as stout peasant farmers, standing up to the might of British imperialism. Across the world, funds were raised for the Boer cause.”
13. DEBUNKED: The conflict has nothing to do with religion. The conflict surrounding the final status of Jerusalem has been ongoing for centuries, involves different versions of monotheism dating back to the crusades, and predates the creation of the modern state of Israel. The worst part of it. We must not allow it to become a binary conflict and permanent war around race, ethnicity and religion. Having said that, it would be more accurate to suggest the conflict revolves around two distinct linguistic and ethnic groups, Hebrew versus Arabic, with the result, a competition over linguistic identity.
Yiddishe Bilder images of demonstrations held throughout Mandatory Palestine opposing ‘The White Paper of 1939’
14. DEBUNKED: Police brutality proves apartheid Another vector of comparison involves simple illustration of similarities in military hardware and tactics deployed by the apartheid state. Thus crude police brutality in the face of widespread civilian unrest during successive ‘Intifadas’ is used as evidence alone to prove a point by way of analogy and resemblance. The same measures may be seen during the Egyptian uprising and other states such as Syria where revolts have occurred and do not in themselves prove apartheid. PA citizens are not fighting to become Israelis but perversely fomenting insurrection based upon what may be termed ‘replacement theology‘ or simple ‘rejectionism’. The Swiss cheese problem of the West Bank is thus a result of counter-measures to deal with a supersessionist uprising (one which seeks to replace Israel with an Arab State), all in the face of population pressure and a general failure to deal with mutual land issues, resulting in polarisation on either side.
15. DEBUNKED: Zionist negotiations with the Hitler regime proves illegitimacy A recent development following the collapse of Jeremy Corbyn’s militant Anti-Zionism within the British Labour Party, has been to trot out slurs regarding the deportation of Hungarian Jews, and narrative related to a “program by the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee referred to as ‘Blood for Goods’ and involving negotiations with the SS to exchange people for military hardware and trucks.” Paul Sanders in ‘The ‘strange Mr Kastner’ – Leadership ethics in Holocaust-era Hungary, in the light of grey zones and dirty hands‘ tackles the existential crisis of the ‘choiceless choices‘ of those accused of ‘dirty hands’. A related meme is the lie that Jews are either responsible for the Holocaust, or complicit in the bombing of Synagogues in Baghdad which lead to the 1941 Farhud.
16. DEBUNKED: There is no path to peace, the only solution is war. The Abraham Accords are a series of joint normalization agreements initially between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, beginning September 15, 2020. On 10 December 2020, Morocco agreed to establish diplomatic relations, followed by Sudan ( January 2021), and Chad which opened an embassy January 2023. Removing the objections of 22 Arab States engaged in a war against Israel is thus an important first step in reaching a negotiated solution.
Clearly accepting the rights of both parties within the macro geopolitical context, one that avoids the religious partisanship of those involved in the Jerusalem conflict, is the only way forward.
17. DEBUNKED: We must choose sides, since standing on the fence is tantamount to support for apartheid During the anti-apartheid struggle where the issues were black and white, standing on the fence was inappropriate. The opposite is true in the Middle East. Declining to support religious conflict, withdrawing from waging war in the name of religion, supporting freedom for all people, defending secularism and seeking to uphold civil rights in our own country, alongside the victories of the non-aligned movement when it comes to the current East-West brinkmanship and Super-power hegemony, is the only peaceful path forward. Nelson Mandela was perhaps the best spokesperson for this position.
Refusing to see the conflict in binary terms, refusing to turn people into heretics, acknowledging the tragedy of injustice vs injustice. Calling for a Secular Freedom Charter, now these are rational interventions on path to peace.
We are all hostages to this ongoing conflict. The time to stand up for secular rights and freedoms, non-alignment and world peace, is now.
IN the annual search for a silver bullet solution to the Middle East problem, activists are rushed into reductionist conclusions. In the process open intellectual inquiry, debate and analysis about the conflict closes down. The resulting dogma and political correctness undermines the struggle for human rights.
In a recent piece, published by IOL, correspondent Azad Essa claims: “Not everyone agrees with the Israeli apartheid terminology, despite its rising legitimacy among many academics and scholars in the field. As a contentious analogy, the UN had never – until last week – officially called it apartheid.”
The statement by Essa is only partially true, since in 1975 the UN did in fact issue a resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. However after the end of the Cold War, the same UN general assembly issued a resolution 46/86, (adopted on 16 December 1991), reversing its earlier resolution. Thus in 1991 “the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly … to revoke the bitterly contested statement it approved in 1975 that said: “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.””
“The official count found 111 nations in favor of repealing the statement and 25 nations, mostly Islamic and hard-line Communists, voting against. Thirteen nations abstained. Seventeen other countries, including Egypt, which recognizes Israel, and Kuwait and China, did not take part in the voting.”
That news-hounds can’t be bothered to do their homework, verifying the facts, can be seen by the persistent belief amongst many activists that resolution 3379 is still in force. A2015 piece by Ben Norton of Mondoweiss, for example, a news outlet exposed as a purveyor of ‘alternative facts’, (i.e. facts which are not true), proceeded to ignore the revocation, and myopically accuses both the United States and Israel of wanting to rewrite history of a resolution which in any event, is null and void.
Until last week, the equation of Israel’s existence with ‘racism and racial domination’, was considered a foregone conclusion, an emerging fact of international law. This week, things were no longer so certain. The problem arose when a controversial report by a UN agency, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) equating Zionism with apartheid, and touted by IOL as definitive of the problem, was suddenly shelved, albeit from intense political pressure.
The recent letter from the Dagga Party and BDS refers.
There was a time when the solidarity campaign with Palestine tolerated secular Jews such as myself, who do not ascribe affiliation to any particular branch of Judaism as such. Over the years, as the campaign has grown, we have seen the closing down of debate, which has merely short-circuited around an untested analogy — the wholesale relocation of our nation’s own experience under apartheid — with the dire results, that unlike the anti-apartheid struggle, dissident points of view, divergent opinions and alternative solutions are ignored.
At no point has there been any consultation with those like myself, who require special needs, in particular that our justice system recognise that freedom of religion, is also freedom from religion, the right not to be subjected to laws governing a religion. The short-circuiting of debate on Israel and the Middle East, and the closing down of secular norms and values, has occurred hand in glove with the erosion of civil rights and freedoms in our own country.
I currently face religious and discursive sanctions in the newsroom as a music journalist, in a country which, having miraculously escaped its past under a Christian Theocracy and the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), looks set to repeat its historical failures and mistakes. A disputed decision handed down by a civil court in South Africa as late as 2010, and 16 years after democracy, not only slated the late Robbie Jansen and trashed the findings of the TRC Final Report, but it upheld the supposed right of employers to interrogate, to discipline and to enforce conformity, over those persons, like myself, who may not be members of a major religion per se, but merely secularists.
Despite my insistance that I am a secular humanist and progressive, who subscribes to the principles of secular humanism as outlined by the Society for Humanistic Judaism, I have been turned into a pariah, apostate and heretic by our justice system, which seemingly eschews secular Judaism and thus the roots of secularism, as anathema – outside the health and boundaries of acceptable discourse in the community.
To make matters worse, legal professionals such as Kahanovitz SC and Ashraf Mahomed, President of the Cape Law Society, have turned into religious police, and this conservative backlash against progressive values is increasing, with absurd consequences. None other than Jeremy Acton of the Dagga Party has jumped on the ecclesiastical band wagon, who when he is not campaigning for the abolition of cannabis prohibition in South Africa, finds the time to oppose cannabis research in the Middle East. His views on the subject in his recent letter to you, must therefore be rejected as the work of a hypocrite and opportunist.
Israel is the leading proponent of Medical Dagga in a region, where both homosexuals and drug users are routinely faced with capital punishment. In Syria, the death penalty is meted out for drug use and trafficking by a despotic regime, whose Ba’ath party under Assad bears the exact same Pan Arab flag waved around at BDS meetings. Unlike any of the Arab States, Israel has also turned into a technology leader where Cannabis is concerned.
Unlike some Orthodox Jewish sects, whose members in New York recently blessed the herb as Kosher for Passover, attempts to raise the issue of harm reduction, public health, rational drug use, medical cannabis, and the abolition of dagga laws amongst BDS, is guaranteed to raise the ire of affiliate organisations such as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad). The organisation eschews all forms of inebriation, recreational or otherwise. I do not have to explain to you what this means for your band, associated as it is with recreational drug use, and civil liberties.
The conservative assaults against traditional Khoisan herbs and beverages by religious cops and the vice squad in South Africa, supposedly enforcing the fatwas, edicts and religious strictures issued on a daily basis by BDS and others, have occurred in an atmosphere of intolerance and political inquisition. I have only to refer to the closing down of popular Observatory Jazz Venue Tagores, following a campaign against Jazz music by the Woodstock constabulary who perceive music itself as licentious, since it supposedly is a gateway to drug use.
Chomsky and many musicians and activists like myself, favour a limited sanctions campaign targeting goods produced by Israeli firms actively involved in the occupation. Such a position is both moderate, accurate and reasoned. It gives opportunity to engage both parties at the same time that it places our voices, behind peace and resistance to war on both sides. It also embraces and articulates the bipartisan position of our nation’s founder, the late Nelson Mandela.
“I explained to Mr Sigmund, that we identify with the PLO because just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination. I went further however to say, that the support for Yasser Arafat and his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state, legally. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secure borders, but of course, as I said to Mr Sigmund in Geneva in August, that we carefully define what we mean by secure borders, we do not mean that Israel has the right to retain the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank. We don’t agree with that, those territories should be returned to the Arab People.”
Clearly the lesson learnt from South Africa’s bitter and tragic experience under apartheid, in particular its unprecedented resolution, is that until we accepted that the other party was a part of the solution, there could be no solution to the problem. Similarly, unless we recognise the rights of both parties to the conflict, in particular Israel’s right to exist, which includes guarantees of access to Jerusalem and other holy sites in the region, as well as the right of access of all Muslims to Al-Aqsa, there will be no end in sight to to the conflict.
I therefore kindly request that you join solidarity with the global campaign for a secular solution to the problems in the Middle East.